A Comparative Study of Two Cases in Software Engineering
Group Review
Charly Paviot
Faculty of Technology and Society Faculty of Technology and Society
Malmö Högskola Malmö Högskola
Abstract​—Globally speaking, Software Engineering
evolved to become even more agile and data driven.
Software Companies are making research on methods and
management to always stay close to customer’s
expectations. In this paper we analyse and compare two
recents studies from international software companies
about their enforcement of the scrum method adoption
and the related software engineering practices. We will
show that companies face several challenges from different
perspectives according to their advancement and strategy.
Finally, we will conclude with some suggestions that could
possibly improve the conversions or the efficiency of the
companies previously described.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, we observe that, large scale agile companies
improved their efficiency and profitability since they instituted
the new architecture and processes. Nevertheless, these
companies have been through many challenges related to the
numerous changes of management and practices at several
levels: business or developers teams. Some of them still get
troubles while evolving and even after.
After a brief presentation of our two case studies : Adobe
Premiere Pro and Yahoo! We will analyse then compare them
with respect to the following topic : « large-scale agile
development ». Then we will propose some suggestions about
potential improvements in order to overcome imposed
challenges.
II. CASE SUMMARIES
For this review, we chose two cases of Scrum adoption in
major software development companies. In this section we
briefly describe the adoption process of these companies and
point in a direction of topics that will be spoken later.
Lenart Papež Jakoub Mahmood
Faculty of Technology and Society
Malmö Högskola
A. Adobe case study
Between 2005 and 2006, some teams of Adobe Premiere Pro
started to evolve [1]. At that moment, Adobe wanted to adapt
the new version on Macintosh machines again.
By the time they developed the product, they wasted
approximatively six months to fix bugs and defects while
others teams were turning to a new approach of development.
Indeed, the Soundbooth team like one from Adobe Premier get
trained to adopt the scrum framework. When they compare the
results, the product and the team conditions, The head of
Adobe premier decide to transform all other team working on
the CS4 project.
In 2008, they try the agile framework for the first time with
the help of the Scrum experimented manager.
B. Yahoo! case study
Yahoo used to be just a small startup company but they
have reached the state of a large enterprise very quickly. They
provide services to over 500 million people worldwide. The
idea for Scrum started in 2004 when one of the Scrum
inventors spoke to Yahoo! senior executives. In 2005, they
decided to adopt the Agile and Scrum frameworks throughout
the organisation and the person who was hired to help them
was Gabrielle Benefield. However, they had to decide whether
to implement Scrum on a large-scale or do everything from
the ground up. They made their choice and currently, they
have over 150 Agile teams and they continue to grow as time
passes.
III. ANALYSIS OF THE ADOBE AND YAHOO! CASE STUDIES
A. Adobe Premiere Pro Case
In the fall of 2008, the Premier Pro team started two days of
training in the basics of Scrum [1]. The two most important
goals of the first release after adapting to Scrum was stability
and performance. They chose to have four week sprints with
three cross-functional Scrum teams. The Program Manager
Sheri Codiana became the Scrum Master for the three scrum
teams.
Challenges started to arise immediately for these
high-performing Scrum teams after adopting to a large-scale
agile development process. Some of the major challenges
included communication with between the different Scrum
teams, they had problems with breaking down the product
backlog into smaller and valuable items. They also had
challenges with working with non-agile teams that had
dependencies with Premiere Pro.
To overcome these major impediments, the Scrum
teams started to use Adobe Connect, which is a desktop
sharing and collaboration tool that has been developed from
Adobe and allows one user to track what the other user is
doing through web cameras or through a chat session. By
using this tool the Scrum teams could overcome the problem
that arose with the communication with the other Scrum
teams. To solve the impediment with the non-agile teams
having dependencies with Premiere Pro, the non-agile teams
started to approach the agile method because coordination
became difficult when the agile teams and the non-agile teams
used different development approaches. In this way the
cooperation between the agile teams and the non-agile teams
will be more homogenous.
Even though major impediments have arisen when
the teams have been trying to adapt to Scrum, the agile
development approach have led to several improvements for
the company. One of the bigger improvements include quality
improvements, where the teams have been starting to keep
detailing metrics on defects to be able to better analyze
defects.
The Adobe teams find out, after comparing the total
open defect of the CS4 and CS5 (respectively before and after
scrum adoption) , that they reduce of 57% of the open defect
just by applying on continuous integration method on the
cycle. They finally attribute this significant improvement to
the cross-functional team approach team. When developers
and testers work together they set realistic goals and reduce
the pressure that can be appreciated by the developers.
Furthermore, both point of views combine help to prevent
defects on the future code.
In this study case [1], Pete Green revealed many
problems faced by the Adobe Team during the Scrum
adoption as described previously.
Now after 2008, employees found a well better
balance work/life and from a market perspective, Premiere Pro
began a leader against Avid’s Media Composer and Final Cut
X. However, according to an internal survey at Adobe
Premiere Pro, some employees still doubt about the relevance
of the agile at large Scale efficiency even after 18 months of
adoption. Hopefully, this percentage is far from the majority
(20%) but still significant.
B. Yahoo! case
Some experimental approaches with Agile methods
started emerging in Yahoo! in November of 2004 [3]. The
problems that arose in the company were more at the project
and team layer rather than the technical layer of Yahoo!. To
handle these organizational problems, the company was
focusing on implementing Scrum in their organization. In
February 2005, Yahoo! launched their Scrum transition
program. They made a decision not to implement Scrum all at
once (on a large-scale) but to give Scrum methodology only
to teams that wished to use it. Based on that decision, there
were 4 teams that volunteered to try the Scrum approach and
then reflect on how it was to work in an Agile way. The teams
had to undergo Scrum training where, during these two-day
training, some team-members became certified Scrum
Masters. The company made clear for the teams that they
could at any given point abandon Scrum if they weren’t
satisfied with the operation of Scrum.
Many teams did not want to commit to Scrum unless
it was proven as a success. Therefore, at the end of the first
month of operating in a Scrum way, teams (along with their
managers) were asked to complete an anonymous online
survey. As we saw from the chart provided in the case paper,
the survey shows that 74% of team members and managers
think Scrum produced massive productivity improvements
over a thirty-day period. In the same survey, 81% of the
respondents answered that they would gladly continue with
the Scrum methods in their team. With that information, other
teams were encouraged to join the process and once real
feedback was provided, even senior management felt more
comfortable with the progress that Scrum was bringing to the
table. In the following year, the number of Scrum teams in
Yahoo! rose from 4 to 40. At one point, the general wish to be
trained and coached for Scrum teams was too big for the
resources Yahoo! had. They have lost all track of the training
processes and were unable to keep up with the demands. Even
with refusing to offer the help they wanted, the teams still
went ahead with adapting to Scrum.
The person who was hired to implement Scrum,
Gabrielle Benefield, mentions they often ran into one of the
main reasons for Scrum failure; it looks simple, but it causes
major changes and changes are hard to get used to. Change
takes a big toll on an individual and can result in stress, extra
work, pain, conflicts with fellow employees. They even
encountered “Agile” team managers who were assigning night
and weekend work to workers, which is completely against the
Agile principles.
They acknowledge that training can make the
biggest impact on whether the Scrum process will fail or
succeed. One challenge they faced was insufficient amount of
resources (people and funding). One of the solutions they
prioritized was showing their funding sources that Scrum
team coaching costs are well worth the investment.
Therefore, they decided to start doing even more surveys and
even make Product Owners on teams to measure the team’s
IV. COMPARISON OF THE CASES
Both of the cases represent huge companies in the domain of
software development. Because of their position and their
size it is safe to say they are one of the leaders regarding
advances in software development. We can see that Yahoo!
and Adobe started the Scrum adoption approximately in the
same time, 2005. They tried Scrum with a few “Guinea Pig”
teams included in the project. The motivation for the
transition was different between the two cases: The wasted
time, lack of efficiency for Adobe, and organizational
structure problems at Yahoo!. Nevertheless, these issues
brought the similar harmful consequences. Both companies
saw a significant waste of time, had employees under
pressure and thus released lower quality products. The Scrum
adoption came out as a new approach and potentially new
perspective to experiment different practices and results.
Finally, the different teams from both companies involved in
the transformation, find the new practices and methods way
more efficient and comfortable than the traditional one.
Now, Adobe chose to institute on the large scale when
Yahoo! headquarter decided to let the teams free to evolve to
this new model following the motivation of the team
members. Thus, there is still some risk of mismatch between
agile and non-agile teams.
In fact, the two cases seems similar in a first point of view,
then if we take a glance more in depth we notice they are
adapting their method in different way because they do not
have the same challenges. Yahoo! focus the efforts in the
individual management configuration while Adobe Premiere
is more focus on the continuous integration to improve the
quality of the release and work conditions. Both finally, work
out on the high-performing teams challenge and succeed
since the studies demonstrate the improvement in many
domains of the development process.
success and productivity over a certain period. Results
showed that teams had a 34% improvement in productivity.
They took this number, presented it to the board and other
funding sources and the Scrum coaching costs were justified.
Once everything was stable, they started inviting
some important people from the Scrum-world to express some
thoughts to company members. Furthermore, they started
offering ScrumMaster training classes. This type of hands-on
coaching was very effective but consumed large amounts of
resources (time).
V. RECOMMENDATION FOR PROCESS IMPROVEMEN​
T
It is clear that there are still some issues regarding the process
in both companies. It would be recommended for Yahoo! to
adopt the same methodology in the work environment for all
the teams involved in the project. Or at least a significantly
high percentage of teams. Scrum is optimized for a stable
ecosystem. It should be adopted as a new way to develop
product amongst the whole organisation, not just a tool used by
some members or some teams in projects. The managers of the
teams themselves should show the positive impacts of the
methodology to higher management and encourage them to
spread this throughout the entire organisation. Instead, in the
case of Yahoo!, someone else (Gabrielle) had to make several
surveys and analyse them in a specific way and only then
forwarded them to more important people. Communication
between employees is another way of encouraging more
members of the company to form a Scrum team. If a team is
having great success with Scrum and shares the word amongst
the reluctant employees, it might convince them to join in
aswell.
VI. CONCLUSION
We have analyzed two cases where two big companies,
Yahoo! and Adobe, had implemented Scrum. Big impediments
started to surface immediately when Adobe implemented
Scrum. They had issues with communication with remote team
members, they lacked in skill with slicing the product backlog
into smaller pieces that could add some value and they also had
problem with working with non-agile teams that still had
dependencies with their old system. To solve these major
impediments, all teams had to use the same desktop sharing
tool so the communication channel between the teams was
open at all times and the non-agile teams had to adjust their
teams to a more agile approach.
Yahoo! did not experience as many major impediments after
implementing Scrum as Adobe did. The result for Yahoo! after
first month was very positive. One of the problems they faced
was actually too big of a demand for coaching Scrum. But with
several surveys and deep analysis they expanded their
resources and Scrum grew more and more amongst the
organisation. At the time the case study was written, they had
150 Scrum teams and many additional teams that call
themselves “Scrum” but actually do mini-waterfall principles.
They mentioned that there is still a long way for them to
achieve what they wanted in the first place, however they
deemed their initial transition as a great success.

VII. REFERENCES

For papers, we used a restricted number of article because of

the lean availability of these one in public databases.
[1] Peter Green, ​Adobe Premiere Pro Scrum Adoption,​?????
[2] I.S. Jacobs and C.P. Bean, “Fine particles, thin films and exchange
anisotropy,” in Magnetism, vol. III, G.T. Rado and H. Suhl, Eds. New
York: Academic, 1963, pp. 271-3
[3] ​Gabrielle Benefield, Rolling out Agile in a Large Enterprise